Small solar home at Middlebury College has big market appeal

Feb. 11, 2012

Deb Tennen, a visiting Italian faculty member, is the current occupant of Self Reliance, the award-winning Middlebury College Solar Decathlon home. Team Middlebury took fourth overall and first in the market-appeal category at the 2011 Solar Decathlon. / Photos by EMILY McMANAMY, Free Press

A farmhouse for the 21st century

Self Reliance was designed to be portable. After construction was completed last summer, it was disassembled into sections for transport to Washington D.C., rebuilt for the Solar Decathlon, then trucked back to Vermont, where its parts finally were put into a permanent configuration in a central campus location.

The modular structure displays a range of materials that were locally sourced from within the state or New England region:

Deb Tennen, a visiting Italian faculty member who is the occupant of Self Reliance, the award-winning Middlebury College Solar Decathlon home, admires the kitchen. / EMILY McMANAMY, Free Press

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MIDDLEBURY — Visitors to Middlebury College will find a new building on campus called Self Reliance, built by students for the 2011 Solar Decathlon, an international green building competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Among an international field of competitors that included schools from China, New Zealand, Belgium and Canada, and American universities from across the country, Team Middlebury came in fourth place overall and won first place in the market-appeal category, an impressive accomplishment for a small liberal arts college.

More than 85 students collaborated on the net-zero home, which features new technologies and energy-efficient components in a compact floorplan.

The modular house now serves as a hip new student residence located near the Admissions Center and the Center for the Arts.

At this week’s Better Building by Design conference sponsored by Efficiency Vermont in Burlington, Andrea Kerz-Murray of the Middlebury College faculty and team members Peter DiPrinzio, Hilary Cunningham and Shane Scranton gave a talk about how they looked to the past to reinvent the residential building of Vermont’s future.

Smart design

What exactly is market appeal? Judges looked at things such as curb appeal, value, materials, comfort and function.

Designed for a family of four with a modest income, Self Reliance features two bedrooms with a shared bath and a kitchen/family area with a small loft that amounts to about 870 square feet of livable space, project manager Addison Godine said.

From the outside, the house looks like a barn with its wood siding and simple outline. A large deck built of rot-resistant white oak extends the living space along the south-facing exterior wall and wraps around the building, providing the master bedroom with its own seating area.

“Old barns were the inspiration for the exterior aesthetic,” said Godine, an architectural studies major who graduated last week, capping two years of work on the project.

“We tried to show Vermont mainly with materials and form,” he said. “Part of the modern aesthetic that we decided on was simplicity and a really clean look — getting rid of extraneous details and ornamentation.”

Inside, wood floors instantly make one feel at home. They’re made from eight sugar maples cut from the Bread Loaf Forest (college lands) that were near the end of their lives.

“The boards are mixed-width to minimize waste in the milling process,” Godine said. “Some of the boards have holes in them from when the trees were tapped for maple sugaring. Rather than throwing these boards out, we featured them to tell the story of the wood.”

Large French doors lead from the great room to the deck, where ergonomically designed raised planter boxes provide growing space for edible crops. For the Solar Decathalon on the Mall in Washington, these boxes were filled with vegetables grown by students who integrated the harvest into a localvore meal that was part of the design competition.

For best solar gain, the house faces directly south. An innovative greenhouse wall spans the length of the kitchen, with fixed shelves for potted plants so that residents can grow produce year-round, reducing the amount of fossil fuels used in trips to the store.

An air-conditioning system and sliding shades made of louvered wood on the greenhouse wall will help minimize hot conditions in summer weather.

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Central location

One of the contest criteria for the Solar Decathlon was for teams to design a home that offers a safe, functional, convenient, comfortable and enjoyable place to live.

With its new location on campus, Self Reliance is situated well for connectivity. Student residents can walk to classes or walk into town for supplies or food.

“It’s accessible for lots of different people,” Godine said, pointing out its close proximity to a residential area with dorms, and to the Art Museum which is housed in the Center for the Arts. “We like that it’s not just off somewhere. It’s prominent.”

Beautiful details

Deb Tennen, a Middlebury graduate who’s teaching an Italian literature course during winter term, moved into the house Jan. 8 and will be followed by three students who will share the space for spring term.

“It’s nice and cozy,” Tennen said. No surprise there — eco-friendly cellulose was blown into walls (11 inches thick), floor (9 inches thick) and roof (22 inches thick), and triple-glazed windows help trap light and retain heat. The metal roof — engineered to last for generations — is topped with 30 solar panels and two solar hot water collectors.

The large windows, open living space and kitchen will be remembered long after Tennen returns to her 420-square-foot studio apartment in Palo Alto, Calif. Not yet a homeowner, she feels the experience of living in Self Reliance has taught her some valuable lessons about scale and engineered design.

“It’s definitely very livable, modern and comfortable, with Vermont touches,” she said. “It’s a great entertaining space; people can cook, eat, watch TV or work at the desk area all at once, and everyone can feel like they’re interacting.”

A 14-foot-long slate-topped peninsula made from locally quarried stone forms a functional divider for the room. On one side are kitchen cabinets of ash built by students who worked with Randy Taplin, a retired cabinet-maker from Warren; on the other side are storage shelves to hold collections of household stuff like games and books.

Flooring in the kitchen area and bathroom is slate: easy to clean, tough and local.

All appliances are Energy Star rated: a Bosch induction cook top, a convection oven, a stainless-steel dishwasher and a vent hood.

The front-loading washing machine and dryer made by LG are hidden behind a sliding barn-board door mounted on a metal track, so they’re out of view when not in use.

LED lights made by Philips Color Kinetics are mounted in cross-tie beams that span the great room’s ceiling, making an ambient glow that reflects even light on the white walls. Other LED fixtures have dimmers that allow them to be adjusted.

“I would say I have a visitor at least every other day,” Tennen said. “A lot of students and faculty have stopped by to take a look, and a middle-school teacher from Ripton wants to bring her class by to see the house.”

Because it’s a student-directed project that models sustainable design, Self Reliance fits perfectly into the Middlebury College community. Enthusiasm for its merits and top honors are widespread, and a new team has formed on campus to compete in the 2013 Solar Decathalon, which will be held in Irvine, Calif.